St. Philip Street

The Street of Streets

Living on St. Philip Street

Great place to grow up whether you were Jewish or not. We must have had, oh, fifteen, twenty Jewish families all living on St. Philip Street within a block. Rabinowitz on one side of us, the Appels across the street. Gershons down the street. I can almost name everybody. Trueres, Oxlers, Prystowskys—two or three Prystowsky families. Solomon, Sam Solomon. When you walked up St. Philip Street—we all went to shul on Friday nights and when you walked home you could smell the cooking from the Sabbath dinners. The kids all got together and played together. We had a good time enjoying each other. Of course, our recreation wasn’t watching TV at the time. We’d run races from one block to the other—things like that that we did for ourselves.

Beth Israel

Beth Israel was on St. Philip Street between Radcliffe and Morris Street. It was in a house which had been in some way altered. They had a big room. I remember you used to go on high steps to go to it. And they had an open basement, nothing below. But on the second floor they had a side porch and they had this room, maybe two rooms or maybe three rooms, which had been stripped apart, that had one long room there, and they had benches in there and they had a small ark, and I remember the reading area. And to the side was an area for women. On the second floor with a gauze curtain hanging in between or a lace curtain. You could see through it. To separate the two sections there. And there was a third floor and I think that the shames stayed up on the third floor or maybe the chazan or shokhet, somebody stayed up on the third floor there.

Patches

SA: I remember. We couldn’t go in the living room. Just on special occasions. Maybe Saturday night to listen to “Inner Sanctum,” right. I remember patches. We had slip covers over those. But we had patches because it would wear out for some reason. I don’t know how because we never used it. But I guarantee you those patches were sparkling clean. Everything in there was sparkling clean. Those slip covers had patches but they were sparkling clean.
FR: Clean. Clean. And before I had a date—we had beautiful floors in the house—I used to put the wax down and I would put on heavy socks, my father’s heavy socks, and I would skate around the room polishing up the floors.